I live in Italy. I may even trust nuclear power (even though I'm not sure if waste management has improved), I don't trust actual human beings handling contracts, funds, and maintenance.

A bridge collapsed in Genoa, killing 43 people, splitting the city in two, and crippling the economy because Autostrade per l'Italia skirted the pesky issue of maintenance.

Unfortunately it's like the lottery, and fear of flying. You can explain the odds and the history until you're blue in the face but it doesn't mean anything when somebody sees a documentary and it fills their whole psyche with terror. And you can try to explain that there are safer plant designs out there and that being careful about where you put a plant is a big deal, but the only thing they're going to walk away from the conversation with is Chernobyl, Fukushima in Three Mile Island.

I hadn't realized until I hung out on a Europe forum that anti-nuclear-power positions are very strong in Germany with the center-left.

Western Austria also has a history here. At one point, they infamously built an entire nuclear power plant -- which is where the real costs of nuclear power come from -- and then shut it down via a referendum driven by the anti-nuclear-power crowd before ever actually using it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Power_Plant

The Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant was the first commercial nuclear plant for electric power generation built in Austria, of three nuclear plants originally envisioned. Construction of the plant at Zwentendorf was finished but the plant never entered service. The start-up of the Zwentendorf plant, as well as the construction of the other two plants, was prevented by a referendum on 5 November 1978, in which a narrow majority of 50.47% voted against the start-up.[1][2]

The plant was purchased by Austrian energy company EVN Group in 2005; it is used as a security training centre[6] and leased for filming, photography, and other events.[7] In 2025, it will be used as the training ground for ENRICH European Robotics Hackathon.[8]

I thought the Netflix show was pretty clear it wasn't as bad as popular history made it out to be.

Posted this earlier:

A poof of radioactive steam let loose. That's it, the whole incident. People freaked out on March 28, 1979.

In totally unrelated news, The China Syndrome, a popular movie about a reactor meltdown, came out March 16, 1979.

It was actually a success story. It failed safe, as designed.

Unfortunately "The China Syndrome" really pumped up anti-nuclesr sentiment.

TMI was the opposite of Chernobyl.

Yep. And underscoring that more than almost anything else is the fact that the TMI facility continued to operate without incident for forty years after that accident.

"Nuclear" sounds scary but it doesn't have to be and generally isn't. There are currently 94 active nuclear reactors in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States

IMHO, the correct take on " uses enormous amounts of energy" is "yes, we do need to invest more in renewable and clean energy". Anyone who didn't have their head in the sand could have known that last century. This is only a problem now because our political leaders have failed us, year after year, decade after decade.

A nuclear plant is not a bad thing

This specific one famously is.

It's on an island, yes. In a river, ten kilometres from a dense urban region.

Turning off the server farm once the sun goes down would be inconvenient.

The Susquehanna River that Three Mile Island sits on offers virtually unlimited fresh cold water for cooling the server farm.

Because you want data centers to be closer to the users for speed.